Same, come to think of it -- almost 20 to the day. In a world of modular software and months-old "unicorns," it's good to remember the monolithic, decades-old tortoises and bristlecones that remain and sustain.

Same here. About twenty years. Started programming with emacs and cvs on DEC Ultrix machines. Learned UNIX the hard way. Good old Dave sitting in the corner, hacking away on imake, and when asked about something answered "Try man something. Don't know what man is? Try man man".

Been on and off with emacs, but never really got into elisp. Only after having to learn Scheme/Racket for a Fluxus project, I read elisp with different eyes now. Really whish I got into Lisp earlier.

> You guys are kids. I used MINCE (Mince is Not Complete EMACS) in 1981.

If we're going to get into I-can-top-that territory here <g>, I used some version of Emacs and Brian Reid's SCRIBE on a DEC-20 machine in 1980-82. (I was a law student; the AI guys at UT Austin's CS department let me have an account to experiment with word processing for the law review -- a grateful shout-out to Dr. Mabry Tyson, a grad student at the time, if by chance he reads this.) Then The Final Word [1] on a Compaq PC clone to do camera-ready copy for my first book. At my law firm I wrote an Emacs keyboard emulator for Word Perfect for MS-DOS (and posted it on CompuServe), then another one for Microsoft Word for Windows.

</obnoxious>

Now if I could only do more than pitiful coconut-headphone programming in Emacs Lisp ....